NYTimes | ON my first night back in Italy, at a dinner
party in Milan, I watched and listened to a successful couple in their
late 40s plot their escape from a country that they love but have lost
faith in. They cleared the plates, opened a laptop, and began checking
out real estate in London, where one of them had been offered a
transfer. The prices horrified but didn’t deter them. They have a
10-year-old son, and they fear that Italy, with 40 percent unemployment among young adults
and an economy whose listlessness has come to seem the new normal,
doesn’t promise a particularly bright future for him.
Two days later and about 200 miles southeast of Milan, it was an older
Italian woman — early 70s, I’d wager — who sang her country’s blues. I
was having lunch on a mountaintop in the Marche region, and with wild
boar sausage in front of me and a castle overhead, I could have
convinced myself that I was in heaven. “A museum,” she corrected me.
“You’re in a museum and an organic garden.” That’s what Italy had come
to, she said. Each year the country lost more of its oomph, more of its
relevance.
Because I was lucky enough to live here once and am always circling
back, I’m well accustomed to Italians’ theatrical pessimism, to their
talent for complaint. It’s something of a sport, something of an opera,
performed with sweeping gesticulations and musical intonations and, in
the past, with an understanding that there was really nowhere else
they’d rather be.
But the arias have been different this time around. The whole mood has.
Ask Italian students what awaits them on the far side of their degrees
and they shrug. Ask their parents when or how Italy will turn the corner
and you get the same expression of bafflement. You hear more than you
did 10 or even five years ago about migrations to Britain, to the United
States. You hear less faith in tomorrow.
I’ve been startled by it. Also spooked, because I arrived here straight
from our government shutdown, and I’ve observed Italy’s discontent
through a filter of America’s woes, processing it as a cautionary tale.
Italy is what happens when a country knows full well what its problems
are but can’t summon the discipline and will to fix them. It’s what
happens when political dysfunction grinds on and on and good governance
becomes a mirage, a myth, a joke. Italy coasts on its phenomenal
blessings rather than building on them and loses traction in a global
economy with more driven competitors. Sound familiar? There’s so much
beauty and promise here, and so much waste. Italy breaks your heart.
